Transparency, translucence, and followup

There are a couple of posts on Seth Godin's blog that really rang my CME bell, so I thought I'd share them with you. The first is called How'd It Work Out?, and is about how we seldom check in long after the fact to see the long-term results of our work. So that immediate post-test is good, and the three-month followup is really good, but how many CME providers check in again in a year? Three years? How long is long enough to be sure the change in behavior is set?

The other, titled Transparent or Translucent?, gave me a different way to look at the whole concept of transparency. Increased transparency has been a big push in CME: Sometimes it's a good thing—like the ACCME's attempts to make its processes and procedures clearer—and sometimes what sounds like a good thing can have some unintended bad consequences (witness the new proposed rule in the Sunshine Act that could cause a real nightmare in reporting requirements for CME providers). Does being able to see clear through something, such as financial relationships between healthcare providers and pharma, really engender trust? Given what happened with ProPublica's Dollars for Docs series, I tend to doubt it. Not sure what translucence would look like in this case, but it's an interesting concept to ponder, isn't it?